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Goldsmiths' Company - Black Box

Goldsmiths' Company - Black Box

An intervention for Goldsmiths’ Fair 2026, Jon Emmony and Silvia Weidenbach’s collaborative installation confronted AI’s opaque “black box” by anchoring digital generation in human touch and material history. By photographing historic Goldsmiths’ Company archive pieces alongside Weidenbach’s early silversmithing works, painting directly onto prints, and feeding them into an algorithmic system, they created an endlessly generating film installation with a dynamically orchestrated soundtrack by Josie Child. Deliberately dialling down the system's object-detection precision, the installation forced the AI to hallucinate and mislabel centuries-old metalwork as objects such as skateboards, flowers, and birds, constantly morphing through transitional forms that were never the same twice.